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“There’s every indication that this was a group of terrorists, not a charity car wash in the Pakistani hinterlands,” one unnamed U.S. official told the AP. The New York Timesquoted an unnamed official as saying: “These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. They were terrorists.”

It’s entirely likely there were some Taliban militants at the meeting. But it’s also highly unlikely that, after years of trying to evade the drones raining missiles on them, more than 30 Pakistani militants would gather in one place at the same time.

Was the United States ordering drone strikes out of spite over the Davis affair? Had the relationship between Islamabad and Washington really come to this? Did the Americans working in Pakistan really understand what they were dealing with? Did they even care?

Even now, years later and at a time when drone strikes in Pakistan are far more rare, I am still amazed when I recall those callous remarks from the unnamed U.S. officials. After everything that had happened with Davis, the Americans didn’t seem to understand something very basic: Pakistanis don’t like being humiliated. That disconnect has a lot to do with the relationship’s unending dysfunction.

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As an American, I wish I could say that the U.S. operation in Pakistan is a well-oiled machine staffed by highly competent individuals with a deep knowledge of the South Asian nation and a commitment to trying to further American interests in a fashion that helps both countries.

Instead, I recall the embassy staffer who, in all seriousness and clearly without a clue about cultural sensitivities, asked if I could hook her up with a handsome Pakistani restaurant owner. I recall the communications officer who told me that the Americans could learn a lot about how to deal with Pakistanis from studying the methods of British colonialists. (Perhaps he hadn’t read the whole history: Those methods were at times brutal, and their views of South Asians deeply flawed; the colonialist legacy in the region is mixed at best.) I recall the numerous horror stories I heard from Pakistanis about how rudely they were treated by the visa section of the U.S. Embassy. One Pakistani friend, who already had a visa to visit the United States, was dazed as he relayed his experience to me. He’d wanted to take his young son along with him for a visit. The embassy refused to issue the boy a visa, while suggesting that my friend might be a child trafficker.

When I would bring up such complaints to the Americans, they would blow them off, effectively accusing all Pakistanis of being liars. (The Americans could be real jerks, but their frustrations with Pakistanis were not entirely unfair or unique to them; an Australian diplomat once told me he feared he was turning into a racist after encountering double-dealing Pakistanis so much.)

The most ridiculous aspect of the American operation in Pakistan was the transient nature of the embassy staff. They’d stay for a year, maybe two, then head to their next assignment. Many barely left the embassy compound, much less Islamabad. Security was a legitimate concern, but I doubt that many of them wanted to learn any more than they had to about a country they would soon be leaving. There were plenty of decent Americans working in Pakistan, but few really cared about the place, and too many had a sense of cultural superiority that infuriated Pakistanis.

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Perhaps my favorite phrase used by the Pakistani military was “This fight will be pursued to its logical conclusion.” The army meant, of course, that it would defeat whoever it was battling, but its definition of logic has not always dovetailed with that of its supposed allies.

The military, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, is believed to have long nurtured armed insurgents to gain the upper hand in its regional rivalries, especially against the country it considers its top foe: India. So over the decades, many Pakistanis have grown comfortable with the concept of the jihadi, or “holy warrior”—so long as those militants were fighting on their country’s behalf.

For the army, there are “bad Taliban” and “good Taliban.” During my time there, the army would alternate between fighting the Pakistani Taliban, which was trying to overthrow the government in Islamabad, and trying to negotiate with them. But it simply would not go after Afghan Taliban fighters who had bases in Pakistan because those militants were not staging attacks on Pakistani soil—infuriating U.S. officials.

Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, often seemed genuinely confused about who the real enemy was. “They’re just local boys!” I remember one Pakistani journalist saying when questioning why the army was battling Pakistani Taliban fighters who had taken over the Swat Valley. If the civilian death toll in a suicide attack was especially high, many Pakistanis would insist that the Americans — or even the Israelis — carried it out because, as they put it, “A Muslim would never kill other Muslims.” The concept of the meddling “foreign hand” was raised so often by Pakistani officials that someone created a Twitter account for it, though, in all honesty – or maybe this was the point? – @foreignhand has recorded no activity.

It was never easy to push Pakistani officials over their country’s alleged support for certain militants. They’d quickly point out that the United States supported Afghan insurgents – the mujahideen – back in the 1980s when it deemed them a useful tool against the Soviets. They’d also look to the future, especially this year, when American troops are due to leave Afghanistan.

“The U.S. is going to leave this neighborhood, but we have to live with what’s left,” Pakistani officials would tell me. It was a veiled way of saying: “Hey, we need the Afghan Taliban not to hate us once they’re back in charge in Kabul.”

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I won’t deny I was delighted to have the biggest story on the planet land in my lap the morning of May 2, 2011.

Nahal Toosi is deputy politics editor for Politico. She was an Associated Press correspondent in Pakistan from April 2008 through August 2011.